`Herringbone' Stars Joel Grey

Joel Grey: Just Enough Like His Vaudevillian Character

May 16, 1993|By FRANK RIZZO; Courant Staff Writer

On Joel Grey's table are several old photographs of himself as a child actor.

The pictures have a formality to them, with actors frozen in a scene, that gives them a slightly haunted edge. A slight lad with curly hair, big dark eyes and a tabula rasa face looks off into the distance.

What was the boy thinking? Grey has been wondering that himself recently as he prepares for his marathon performance in the one-person show "Herringbone," which is now in previews and opens Friday at the Hartford Stage Company.

In the play with music, Grey plays George Herringbone, a 60-ish vaudevillian who looks back at one year in his childhood at the start of the Depression and the characters that surrounded his life. Grey plays all the parts himself. "It's a `Sybil' with music," he jokes.

"My experience with my life [as a child actor] is different than George's," says Grey during an interview at the downtown apartment where he is staying during the Hartford run. "But it's similar enough for me to identify and to be interested in telling his story."

Dressed in sweats and curled up on a chair, Grey doesn't look his 61 years. But neither does he come across as an always-on song-and-dance man who has charmed audiences in such Broadway musicals as "George M!", "Goodtime Charley" and "The Grand Tour." With Yo-Yo Ma playing on a cassette, Grey evokes the role of a serious actor who has performed such heady work as John Guare's "Marco Polo Sings a Solo," Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart" and Robert Wilson's production of Henrik Ibsen's "When We Dead Awaken."

Grey has been drawn to "Herringbone" since it began as a play in the late '70s, continued as an off-Broadway production with music (which starred David Rounds) at various theaters from London to Quebec, to finally its latest reworked revival in Hartford.

"The play takes you into deep, psychological, emotional layers that most of us don't want to approach," says Graciela Daniele, who

is directing "Herringbone." Daniele, who had worked with Grey as a choreographer when he was directing the revival of "Zorba" with Anthony Quinn, says Grey's performance "touches very personal feelings about family, about your life as a performer, what you have to go through, the sense of being used and abused in life, and all of those things are extremely dark."

Says Tom Cone, author of "Herringbone": "Joel has done an amazing amount of homework and research in doing this part, even on his own life. I think having a mature actor of that range and of that experience, that it's just going to lend so much empathy to what we've already seen [in previous productions.]"

Grey is careful to separate his professional beginnings from those of the possessed character he plays.

"I wasn't forced to be in the theater [in the way George is.] It was something that I was drawn to and chose and that I absolutely adored. It happened to satisfy some psychological and emotional needs in my family. But I think living [as a child actor] is similar for George and myself."

Grey began performing at the Cleveland Play House in the early '40s, playing juvenile roles in often serious plays.

"I loved being in the theater," he says. "It was a place of enormous excitement and happiness and safety and respect and dignity. It was a place where if you did your job, you weren't a kid -- you were a full person worthy of respect from all the adults in the company."

But there were problems, too, for the child actor.

"I think there is a lot of loss in being a professional child actor. All of a sudden you start to want to be an adult at the age of 8 or 9. I never did kid stuff, so to speak, so I was in many ways ostracized by the other kids. But I did get this other life, so it was a trade-off. Without dwelling on it, let's say there was a lot of sadness."

It was the type of life one of his children followed.

Grey's son is a chef in Napa Valley, Calif. But his daughter, Jennifer Grey ("Dirty Dancing," "Wind") decided on an acting career. Her father, however, didn't want her to follow that path too soon in her life.

"I was dead set against her doing it professionally as a child," he says. "I thought if she wanted to do it in school, fine, but that she should graduate from high school. And then if she wanted to do it, I would give her my blessing. But I thought she should have a bit more normal upbringing than I did -- and she did. She says now that as frustrating and impatient as it was for her, she was glad I took that position."

But Grey's entrance to the acting life was different.

Grey's father was Mickey Katz, who started as a serious musician and emerged as a popular comedian of his day, creating Yiddish song parodies in novelty bands, such as Spike Jones.